Jeremy Leggett is one of the world's energy experts. He's also a solar energy entrepreneur, a great activist, a member of the Green New Deal group and a blogger. To quite a large degree I think Jeremy and I share a worldview. He's just written:
Suddenly believers in the possibility of a better civilization, one rooted in increasing human co-operation and harmony, find ourselves in a world where demagogues can now realistically plot the polar opposite: a new despotism rooted in rising isolationist nationalism and human conflict. The more we dig into how the demagogues and their supporters have organised their recent successes, in particular in using technology to manipulate voter beliefs on an industrial scale, the more terrified many of us find ourselves. Yet at the same time, tantalisingly, our visions of a better civilization, one appropriate for common security and prosperity among nations in the 21st century, seem more feasible today than they have ever been, at least in some of their component parts. In this struggle between two vastly different world views, a kind of global civil war seems to have broken out in the last 9 months or so.
I am changing this blog to reflect these changed times. For years now I have been chronicling only two relevant themes: climate and energy. Starting with this blog, I will be covering seven. After the evidence of Donald Trump's opening month as US President, I no longer think it is valid to consider climate and energy separately from the bigger global picture.
I invite the reader to consider my seven chosen themes as dials, each of which will need to be turned up near to full positive in the next decade. They are labelled climate, energy, tech, truth, inequality, reform, and conflict. This list is not comprehensive in capturing the struggle between appropriate civilization and new despotism. But I contend that if most of these particular dials are turned down anywhere near full negative, demagogues will have found their road to new despotism, and we can expect a future based on unbreakable police states.
He then adds:
Let me summarise my sense of the global setting of each of the seven dials in turn, as things stand.
This analysis is available here, and I recommend it.
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This article enumerates the many ways in which the neo-feudal state, based on predatory crony capitalism for the 1% (actually, as someone has said, the 0.001%) are seeking to lock in the new despotism, and lock out civilisation and democracy.
http://m.truthdig.com/report/item/why_are_my_highly_educated_friends_so_ignorant_about_trade_20170211
We really ARE at the 1941 moment, where capitalist Britain, and later capitalist America, realised they had to ally with Communist Russia and the USSR, to face down the greater threat of the barbarous “Thousand Year Reich”.
I agree entirely with Richard that we need PR, and a Progressive Front against the Tories, who, despite their honourable ” One Nation” past, under Peel, Disraeli and Macmillan, have morphed into the “bought and sold” enforcers of the 0.001%.
We are truly facing a crisis, and need to find allies for the fight from wherever they may arise, but especially Labour, or Tacitus’s comment on British resistance to Roman rule will come true:
“Singuli pugnant; universi vincuntur”
each (i.e. tribe) fights their own battle, so they are all defeated together.
A great comparison
No one wanted to ally with Stalin
Needs required it
Apparently that’s beyond most political capacity now
This, quite frankly, smacks of hyperventilation in a political sense. Before tackling the demagogues, the focus should be on the genuine grounds for so much public disgust and anger at a failing economic and political system that has led so many voters to conclude that they had no option but to vote, for example, for Brexit or for Donald Trump (and will lead voters in the Netherlands, France and Germany to vote, repectively, for Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party, Marine le Pen’s Front National and the AfD).
We should celebrate the fact that these voters are registering their justifiable disgust and anger almost exclusively in the polling booths. Attacking those for whom they have voted or for whom they appear minded to vote will simply increase polarisation and conflict. Demonising these voters (for example, Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and accusing them of racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, etc.) are even more reprehensible. We need to recognise that most of these voters are simply fed up of being ripped off, exploited, isolated, atomised, disenfranchised and excluded by the current political and economic system. And they are equally fed up of being inundated by layers of self-serving bullshit being spouted by the corporate capitalist class, high net worth individuals and oligarchs, by the politicians these capitalists have suborned and by the armies of professional flunkies and functionaries they retain.
It should not be surprising these voters in the US have chosen a big orange-coloured enema and that a majority of UK voters have chosen Brexit to clear these colossal faecal blockages.
The inevitable counter-productive and self-harming impacts of these decisions reflects the extent of their despair at the self-serving antics of those exercising political and economic power. The latter’s deliberate destruction of any means by those outside the gilded circles of applying effective collective action is coming back to haunt them.
So you’d rather Trump than reasoned analysis
Really?
For heaven’s sake spot the difference between thinking and bullshit
Your smart-arsed, sarky effort to avoid the point I’m making perfectly illustrates why the centre-left is floundering in most advanced economies.
Thank you
I was missing no point: I’ve done more than most to challenge the neoliberal paradigm so I have nothing to apologise for
What I find astonishing is people saying voting for Trump is rational when seeking alternatives is rational
If you want a right wing solution, say so and go for it
If you want a real solution start discussing it and do not say well reasoned argument is hyper-ventilation
Your choice
But your own words rather reveal where you really are not looking for solutions and that’s disappointing as some of your previous comments suggested rather more insight than that
Oh, and if you had a point other than petty abuse hurling it was not apparent
Paul is correct, Richard. You sound so certain and arrogant (like Trump in many respects). And you make the mistake of many in that you CHOOSE what you want to hear. The Left doesn’t need supercilious individuals squabbling amongst each other.
It is clear that you both have similar outlooks, so find some common ground rather than ‘winning’ all the time. Even Chomsky gets it wrong (his inherent belief in the ‘innocence’ of mankind). We all know it is harder to defend the Left’s policy vs the Right’s. That is the great struggle – bypassing humanity’s selfishness and pleading with it not to chase Mammon and greed.
It can be done, but not while the intelligent crop (‘the convincers’) on the Left show huge disdain for dialectics and true debate. See the light, Richard. See the light. Being a stubborn, old bast*rd can be humorous at times, but not when it comes to the brass tacks of changing this bloody stupid and parochial world.
Did I squabble?
I said stop talking crap that justified the election of the far right
You think Trump is better than Clinton? Really?
I don’t have time for that nonsense
I fully get the need for change but if we’re all to dumb down in the process because it’s patronising to have an argument, which is how I summarise the case made against Jeremy Legget’s argument – then frankly we’ve lost before we start and I have no interest in that
I’ll keep changing the world my way, because so far it seems to be working pretty darned well
Richard
I don’t mind a ding-dong. And I certainly didn’t mention dumbing down. No. No. No. (Philosopher Kings if I had it my way.) In your inflamed responses I sense the failure to properly engage – that’s all; the nasty habit of paraphrasing people.
What is this “my way” Sinatra stuff? That has a real demagogue feel. Perhaps just be a little bit more dispassionate when it’s required instead of jumping in with both feet.
Dip into Herzog by Saul Bellow I’d suggest. We all know we’ve not had a good set of politicians for decades. Conniving bast*rds with no scruples tend to rise unfortunately.
For heaven’s sake! My way, means the way I do things…..which has worked pretty well if I note the achievements others have logged for it
Get over yourself: I’m claiming nothing superior at all
I was objecting to reasoned argument being called hyperventilation
If you don’t like it very politely go and do it ‘your way’ somewhere else and stop casting the aspersions here behind your less than fully disclosed identity
A fascinating read, Richard. Thanks for sharing. Picking up on the AI issue and the role of Cambridge Analytica in the US presidential election (to which Andrew Dickie linked to a lengthy article some weeks ago), I find it difficult not to conclude that the elections taking place across Europe and more widely in 2017, and possibly through most of 2018, will be the last we’ll see based on the model of electioneering and campaigning that’s dominated since the advent of what we traditionally refer to as the ‘mass media’ (newspapers and print – including posters, leaflets, etc; radio; television; and door to door, and face to face campaigning; etc).
As Leggett points out, it’s now accepted that by the time of the next presidential election there’ll be no return from elections based on AI generated “personalised manipulation” (I can’t think of a better term just now). That being so, and given the Tory party’s close links to the Republican party, I cannot believe that our election in 2020 won’t be similarly “infected”. Indeed, if I were a Tory election strategist, and given that money is never much of an object come election time for the Tories, I wouldn’t be doing much of a job if I didn’t get Cambridge Analytica or some similar organisation involved in the campaign from an early point. I suspect that “fake news”as we understand the term today will be the least of our worries by then.
As ever, I agree
Leggett makes mostly fair points and I agree with the headlines. That said, the one on reform needs a bit more thinking through: “Sixth, reform. Turning this dial up will require much more attention to market failures”
I’d suggest that it is the marketisation of almost everything that is the problem. Want to protect the environment? first put a value on it etc. Mankind invented markets – but sometimes I sense that it is markets that are running mankind. Re-expressing: “Reform: let’s try to define where markets are useful & where they are needed make sure they work for people” I could add more but I think most get my drift.
That is exactly what he means, I think
Thanks for the recommendation: Leggett is certainly an interesting commentator.
The one area where I might disagree would be his view of the near and ‘middle’ future: I spend more time than most with mediaeval historians, economists, IT security researchers and dystopian Science Fiction authors – and more time than is good for me with all of them, in the same room together, with beer.
Despite the beer and our best efforts, some of those conversations are very sober, and very sobering indeed. A particular point is Jeremy Leggett’s prediction that we can expect a future based on unbreakable police states.
I am actually less optimistic than that.
All police states eventually fail, and all of them eventually will: the question is how badly, and what kind of society emerges from the rubble.
Germany is a shining example, despite the visible presence of racists and the occasional Swastika; some countries further East, less so.
Some countries closer to home, too.
We have more to discover about the powers of surveillance and oppression that exist in the Information Age; and nobody’s talking – yet – about ‘soft oppression’, a society of pervasive blacklisting and social media manipulation which might have no need of prisons. Sober discussions, indeed: and I choose not to recount or recollect any discussion of the failure modes built into such societies.
But fail they can, and fail they will.
The immediate threat is more banal – and, like the Internet, unforseen by ‘Futurists’ and mainstream SF authors until after the event is upon us – a society that believes itself to be free, because it believes anything and everything, and nothing.
A truthless society.
We can see some of this in the World’s existing dictatorships, where a total lack of faith in all and any media channel ‘news’ feed yields to rumours and exaggeration, public ‘scares’, and – more often than we see reported – violent sectarianism and xenophobia.
So Jeremy Leggett’s idea of a ‘dial’ for this is quite a valuable contribution.
I don’t think he’s thought it through, not to the logical and all-too-foreseeable end: but I can’t blame him for that, because those of us who might do so are very well aware that some things are too sobering to be considered while sober.
Double plus good post.